Nazi Megastructures

In their quest for world domination, the Nazis built some of the biggest and deadliest pieces of military hardware and malevolent technology in history. They created huge terror machines, hi-tech superguns and some of the original weapons of mass destruction in order to control a nation, conquer a continent and win the war. With total European military supremacy as their driving force, the Germans build defensive bunkers and impenetrable submarine pens. Over six mesmerising episodes, Nazi Megastructures uncovers the hidden remains of Hitler’s most ambitious megastructures, telling the stories of the engineering geniuses who designed them and revealing how these structures sparked a technological revolution that changed warfare forever. Produced by National Geographic.

Episodes

Hitler’s megalomaniac impulses led him to demand the construction of the largest tank the world had ever seen, a mobile fortress weighing 180 tons. But even this colossus couldn’t satisfy Hitler’s thirst for enormous weapons of war, as he went on to request a land battleship weighing 1,000 tons. This is the story of the Nazi engineers tasked with fulfilling ...

In this episode, we explore one of the most technologically advanced aeroplanes of World War II. A fighter jet that inspired a revolution in aerial warfare: the Messerschmitt Me 262. This is the remarkable story of an awe-inspiring aircraft, the subterranean bat-cave where it was built and the battle for air supremacy that decided the fate of the war.

April 1945. Hitler is in the centre of Berlin, 30 feet (10 meters) underground, surrounded by 13-foot (4m) thick concrete walls, safe from any attack the Allies can throw at him from the air. But the Russians are advancing on the ground. The Red Army is lined up on the Oder River, and they’re coming for the Führer. Blocking the ...

To create a safe haven in port for their lethal U-boat submarines, the Nazis built massive, impenetrable concrete submarine pens. Structures too immense to be hidden, they were constructed to withstand direct hits from even the biggest Allied bombs. Such was their size and strength that these pens still survive today, a testament to their engineering.

The first ever long-range rockets were designed and built by the Nazis in a network of top secret research labs, underground silos and hi-tech launch pads. This is the story of how scientist Werner von Braun heralded the birth of ballistic missiles and laid the technological foundations for the space race.

To protect occupied Europe from an Allied invasion, Hitler demanded the construction of a defensive wall stretching thousands of kilometres, from France in the South to Norway in the North. This is the story of how this vast engineering project sucked in huge quantities of raw materials and men from all over the Third Reich and faced its ultimate test ...